The Fly-By-Nights Read Online Free PDF

But I do like it.”
    “So do we all,” Zach answered. “The heat, too…but there are different kinds of heat. Up there in the atmosphere—which I’m told was thicker before the war—there was something they called an ozone layer. That’s mostly gone now. Anyway, I’m sure you learned about it in school in the refuge and probably understand the science at least as well as I do: how apart from ordinary heat, radiation from the sun gets through much easier now. And if you add to that the lingering nuclear radiation from the bombs…the overall effect is deadly! Yes, the lead shuts out the light some, but at the same time its great weight shuts out the radiation, too—well, a little of it, thank goodness!”
    Garth nodded. “And during the war? It was nuclear radiation made the fly-by-nights, right?”
    “After the war,” Zach corrected him, and nodded. “But there are several different theories. I go for the one that says they were here from the beginning, evolving along with the first men. You see, every creature has its parasites: the dogs have fleas, even our guard dogs. The birds, what few are left—like those scabby crows we saw when we sheltered up yesterday—they have mites. Even the bees in the flowers under those trees where we camped. And since time began these creatures have been learning to hide themselves, surviving, evolving. It’s instinct, that’s all; but it makes them hard to seek out, hard to get rid of. Likewise the fly-by-nights.
    “The theory has it that they too learned to stay out of the light, hiding themselves from men. In the beginning there might have been just a few of them; they’d keep their numbers down in order to stay hidden. In the times I’m talking about, all those hundreds or thousands of years ago, whenever they fed on people they would probably kill their prey, devouring all so as not to make more like themselves. And so they were always there, these parasites , living on the blood and flesh of men and beasts.
    “However, for all their evil intelligence they would sometimes make mistakes; accidentally leaving clues that caused the folk of those times to suspect their existence, their presence. Why, they might even be caught red-handed! And it was like that—slowly but surely—that these monsters became part of humanity’s myths and legends…”
    “When I was just a child,” Garth said, frowning at an elusive memory from the past, “back there in the refuge, I remember seeing—what was it called, a film, a ‘movie’?—that showed a very different kind of fly-by-night. They weren’t the same as our fly-by-nights and men didn’t call them by that name.”
    “Vampires!” Zach nodded again. “You have a good memory, for you were only three or four years old! That was a training film in the days before our viewscreens and discs gave up the ghost. And despite that it was a fiction—a so-called ‘entertainment’ from the old world—still the folk of the clan, even the young ones and others who might never be required to venture outside, they were obliged to see it in order to instill in them at least a measure of dread: some knowledge however false, misshapen, or exaggerated, of the evil lurking out there in the dark. And you remember that, eh?”
    “I remember it frightened me!” Garth replied. “I was a just a child, after all. All that blood and screaming…of course I was afraid!”
    “That’s right,” said Zach. “It was supposed to frighten you. That was its purpose. But what you saw up there on that screen: all that blood…that’s not how it is.” He shook his head.
    Garth stared at his father and said: “I know. That’s what I asked myself after I destroyed that thing: ‘Where’s the blood?’ I saw spongy pulp and pink froth, but—”
    “—But no blood, or very little? And then dry as dust? Yes, that’s how it is.” And yet again Zach’s nod. “The fly-by-nights are mutations, Garth. And you’re right, for in the aftermath of